Time = Money = Bitterness

By

Christopher Shea

Feb 9, 2012 4:10 pm ET

Blame some of your unhappiness on Ben Franklin, if you like: Thinking of time in terms of money makes it harder to appreciate leisure.

That’s the conclusion of a recent study. Researchers had 53 undergraduates answer questions about how much they expected to earn when they graduated, how many hours a week they’d work, how many weeks per year. Some participants were then asked to compute the effective hourly wage, while others weren’t. The purpose was to nudge some students into a Franklin-esque “time is money” mindset.

Then the students got to take a 10-minute break, to surf the web in whatever way they wished. Afterwards, they rated how happy they were, on a five-point scale. As researchers had hypothesized, the students who had just calculated their hourly wage were less happy, after the free time, than those who had not done the mercenary math….